I'm dealing with some poorly planned, poorly written code right now, and I don't have the time to do a rewrite. I need to be able to access a view that is rendered on the same page, but otherwise separate from the view I need to access it from.
Given the element that contains the external view, how can I access it? Is there a better way to make the view available (without rewriting the way they are wired together)?
I suppose that you are using marionette. Your question is in particular a design question rather than a simple line of code to do another nasty thing. Ideally , something like $("#element") is not a good practice because it goes through whole of your DOM to figure out the element.
Rather I would suggest you the below approach which works well in most of the places given both your views are view1 and view2 :
Make a Layout View in specifying the regions which contain both these views.
Now all you have to do is initialize both these views inside the above created Layout View.
When you want to access anything from view1 to view2, all you do inside view1 is something like below:
From the child Item view of layout :
this.triggerMethod('show:message', msg);
and The layout has some code like :
childEvents: {
'show:message': function (childView, msg) {
view2.dosomething();
}
}
This way you can keep the views functionality separate from each other and also you code remains clean.
I guess for this you can also look at Marionette documentation http://marionettejs.com/docs/marionette.layoutview.html
Related
Long story short, let's say one app has multiple pages with:
a form
a list
pagination
each page may require (now or in the future) custom actions to be implemented
My question is, witch is the preferred Backbone way of handling this and why (please argument) ?
Define, a pagination view, a pagination collection, a search model, search view, etc, and initialize each one as a child view in all the necessary pages. This means we will have to append child view elements into the 'master' element, and handle all the communication between these in all necessary pages.
Define a pagination view (with it's own pagination collection and search model) and extending it across all the necessary pages. This does mean that we will have to make use of template partials (for forms, pagination, etc) and bypasses the need of handling communication between child views while also removes the need of appending/removing child view elements.
Please add your way of handling these cases if not found above, remember to argument.
My personal opinion would be 2. And that is because it removes a lot of hustle with communication between child views and it makes everything much more easier to read just by extending classes, instead of having to 'manually' init child views. It also gives one the option to rewrite behavior per page when needed.
I think #2 is a poor choice.
It's a very good idea to keep templates as simple as possible. They are basically just the markup that's generated for some input object. In order to get that object to the template, in MV* frameworks you have Views, that can either pass a model to the template or send some formatted data to the template (I prefer this where possible).
Partials just create markup. You'll still have to handle events, updates to the DOM and rendering inside the view. If you only use one view it will have to handle a lot of things, something associated with poor maintainability and a more bug prone codebase.
You'll either have a lot of code in the views, or you'll end up with a lot of mixins or doing a lot of inheritance - and I have no idea which is worse.
Big things are a lot harder to test and to reason about. Avoid doing big things.
I think that another big problem with the template partials approach is the fact that you cannot rely on type information (something like interfaces), on the object that ends up in the template. It's probably easy to make it work when you have a partial or two that you just created, but, in time this information will get lost, leading to a bad development experience.
You'll need to make sure views unrelated to your changes are kept updated with the partial changes you just made for a feature.
Keep in mind that software is never done. Things always change.
Instead of thinking about relationships between models you'll have another complex challenge that you need to handle: the coupling of views through partials.
The alternative is a lot better. Composing specialized views is a good approach because each has it's own internal, smaller state and just it notifies listeners when some action takes place. Nobody cares about what's going on there until something happens and then you just get concrete data.
Going with #1 helps you deal with complexity in your application while allowing you to reuse them in other contexts.
I have a main section of code that initialises of all my views. How should I handle / listen / bind events from the main sections (probably will turn this into a main app view eventually) with elements of these initialised views? I could pass a reference of a view into another view and do something from inside that view but I'd rather have all this logic in the main / parent. Is this possible or good practice?
If they are all DOM events. No, each view should handle it's own DOM events.
If one view needs to know if something is happening in another view...well, there're lots of ways to do it. I'd usually prefer the subscriber/publisher pattern.
See my answer to another question for code examples:
Call a function in another Marionette.ItemView
You do not need Marionette for that.
I need to setup a quite huge Application with arround >20 main views plus forms. A mainview will at least contain one grid but can contain upto ten grids. There are also some mainviews that contains a Portal-Panel.
Now it comes that it take quite some time till a mainview opens which don't happends as I tested it with just one instead of >20. The Application lays within a Viewport with fit layout which holds a container with Borderlayout. The Mainview always render within the center while the other regions are used for navigation.
My first approach caching things within a tabpanel
My first approach was to got with a Tab-Panel with hidden tabs. Parallel to that I manage a MixedCollection where I make lookups if the View has already been inserted into the tabpanel or has to be created. If it has already been inserted I fetch the positon from the MixedCollection and run the setActiveTab(). But it seems worthless cause it takes all the same time to insert a new mainview or to activate a existing with setActiveTab().
So what I am doing wrong and how can I make this better?
Edit
The problem seems to come from the rendertime and that the component seems to get reredenred each time setActiveTab() is used. It takes up to 2-3 secs to render a view into the center panel. Therefore I thought I can be speed it up by caching a already created view so that the rendering and sizing didn't need to be done. I guess I should mention that in the north region a menu is also rendered each time, which not get's chached but that shouldn't matter, shouldn't it?
How the views are switched
I have a extra controller that manages the menue-view and the main-view changes. For that the menue gets removed from the container and the new menue is added and for the main-view a lookup is done in the mentioned mixed-collection if the view has already been created and if so the tab-index is received and the tab activated. If not the view get added as new tab and is afterwards added with it's ident and index to the mixed collection.
It may help you to take a look at suspendLayouts() and resumeLayouts()
You run Ext.suspendLayouts(); before you begin changing the views and Ext.resumeLayouts(true) after you are done with all views.
You should also check for overnesting, meaning you have nested to much components into each other.
Example:
If a grid is the only component within a tabpanel then it would be overnesting if you place that grid in a extra panel and then into the tabpanel.
Firstly what I found that non active tabs will be populated anyway. I don't know why. But my stores for not active tabs loaded anyway.
Second, it is really doesn't matter the size of your app. We have a lot of views and everything works pretty fast.
In most cases it is depends:
First is nesting - review your code. Less nesting more speed. For example instead of panel if you dont need all stuff that panel provide- use container. Because all this stuff is add more divs to your dom.
Depends how you create your view. Without your code it is really hard to say, why it is slow. Maybe you create your view every time when you open tab, or go to another view.
As mention #sra try to use suspendLayouts - it means that your browser will render your stuff only resumeLayouts, instead of rerender everything everytime when you add any component.
If you use windows - use closeAction:hide instead of destroy.
Not use Ext.getCmp(). I also hear that refs can slow down application because they start searching your component from the body. But it not proved info :) Use component.down('id'), component.up('xtype') it will search only from your component not from the body.
Not create your view from controller everytime when you do something using Ext.create('Panel'). It means it will created everytime.
Use less global events because this is also slowdown your app.
It is really hard to say what is the issue in your case without code. This is only few point that can help you. But my suggestion to looking to nesting and how and where you create a view.
This seems to be a really naive question, but how on earth does one get the NavigationService from outside of a page, like say perhaps a view model? Everybody says that navigation should occur at the view, but I keep thinking, this is not a web page, its an application. The view model and business logic should control application flow, not the view. Is this in fact naive?
As far as I understand it, operations involving the View, i.e. UI, should be done by the View exclusively. When working with MVVM, the UI should not be controlled by the ViewModel or BusinessLogic directly (since they are not supposed to know anything about the concrete implementation of the View) but work with Messages.
That means, if we want to open an Editor window from the ViewModel we send a Message from the ViewModel that we want to open it and receive it in the View and open the window there. The same is valid for Navigating through different pages, where you would receive the Message in the MainPage (or whatever holds you pages that you want to navigate through) and handle everything there.
An alternative to that would be using a DialogService or something like that, which handles opening windows in a central place. However, since the NavigationService is a property of the Page class, we need to handle the message in the Page.
Example code, using the MVVM Light Toolkit: (not tested, partly taken from Shawn Wildermuth's RiaXBoxGames example):
ViewModel (e.g., put that in a Command for a Button):
Messenger.Default.Send<bool>(true, "GoToNextPage");
View (e.g. put that in a Constructor):
Messenger.Default.Register<bool>(this, "GoToNextPage", ignore =>
{
// your code to go to next page
});
another option is to create an event on ViewModel, fire this event when Command occurs and subscribe View to this event. Inside EventArgs you can carry which page to navigate to etc. I think simple and testable solution.
Robert
I just pass a reference to the Frame when I create the View-Model.
I understand the syntax but not how really to use it. It's clear in many basic scenarios but as soon as it get's a little bit advanced I start getting a headache.
For example there are many different views but often not clear wich one to use. Also should you use always just one or mix and match. Do you use the view as your itemssource for ItemsControls?
I'm gonna give a scenario. I have items from a database that I need to show info about in a app and also allow to edit and add new. The items form a hierarchy and the models are of different types. So the top level have children and they then have children.
I could show it in a TreeView or some itemscontrol. Problem here is I tend to bind to the children property of the root elements wich returns a List of chilren. Now the children aren't really inside a view, like I can't call editview.addnew() or filter the children straight away. Question is how do I ensure the children are also in a view and their children and so on. Should the model return a view, should I create a seperate view for each children type or even for each parent?
Another thing is if I'm allowing editing should I put the Collections straight into a IEditableCollectionView or wrap it in ICollectionView first (why is that better)?
Is there a good guide to using views that isn't just pure basics?